Despite claims of waste, sheriff calls program necessary

The number of take-home vehicles issued by the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department has climbed, even after pledges by agency officials that the program would be scoured for potential savings.

The department now has 617 take-home cars assigned to detectives, evidence technicians, lawyers and other employees, all of whom get their gas, insurance and maintenance costs paid by the county.

That represents a 1 percent increase since October 2011, when U-T Watchdog reported 611 sheriff’s employees were driving take-home vehicles. In early 2011, the department had 582 take-home vehicles in its fleet.

Almost 1 in 6 sheriff’s employees drive county vehicles to and from work. About 90 of those live in Imperial, Riverside or Orange County and commute to San Diego County at taxpayer expense.

Sheriff Bill Gore said he continues to eliminate the benefit for top officials as they retire. He attributed the 1 percent bump to new programs he has instituted since 2011.

“We are a mobile organization and that means having cars to respond anywhere in this large county in an emergency situation,” he said. “I know this is looked at as a benefit or a perk, but the hostage negotiator who’s called out at 3 or 4 in the morning doesn’t quite look at it that way.”

The take-home car program has been criticized by taxpayer groups, residents, sheriff’s candidates and others. Gore said the program is critical to effective law enforcement.

It’s unclear how much the department spends on the program because costs are not broken out to differentiate take-home vehicles from others in the sheriff’s fleet.

The department spends about $20 million a year operating almost 1,500 cruisers, SUVs and other vehicles. That’s out of a 2012-13 sheriff’s budget of $635.2 million covering 3,896 full-time positions.

Gore said members of the newly created alternative-custody unit and the “analysis-driven law enforcement” team were issued take-home cars.

The alternative-custody unit monitors former inmates who are no longer in custody as a result of the state’s prison-realignment program. The analysis-driven law enforcement team floats from community to community on temporary assignment to investigate technology-related crimes, Gore said.

“Every chief of police and sheriff in the country is looking at cars and what is the appropriate balance between providing public safety and being a good steward of the public’s money,” he said.

The sheriff’s take-home car program has been an issue for years, most recently in 2010 when candidates running against then- acting Sheriff Gore raised it as a campaign issue.

Gore, who was appointed to the sheriff’s job after Bill Kolender resigned midterm, pledged to review the program and make cuts where he could. He was elected sheriff in June 2010 with 56 percent of the vote.

In 2011, his first full year as elected sheriff, Gore surveyed the take-home car program as a follow-up to his campaign promise. An internal audit showed the take-home cars average a 41-mile round-trip commute. Employees are not required to live inside San Diego County.

“Now that all of the data has been compiled, we can begin a complete analysis of the most effective and efficient use of this research,” Gore said in 2011.

Thomas Metcalf, a federal employee from Mission Valley, alerted the Sheriff’s Department to one county car he saw regularly in Orange County, where he visits his girlfriend.

Earlier this month, he emailed Gore and other officials about the county-owned car and suggested ways to cut expenses.

Among other things, he suggested reserving their use to emergencies and setting limits on how far employees can commute.

“As a citizen of San Diego, I am very disappointed with the wasteful spending practices and perks that the sheriff allows to happen on the backs of the taxpayers,” Metcalf said. “This is not what he promised.”

Gore, who is up for re-election next year, said the program pays off because employees are able to store equipment in the trunks and save time responding to cases.

The sheriff also noted that a San Diego officer driving a take-home car was one of the first people on the scene in Lakeside last September, when a suspected child molester shot a sheriff’s deputy and sergeant.